Trouble with the humans

Working-class whites are angry with the Democrats for lots of reasons. Race is not one of them

ONE of Barack Obama's political problems, a popular quip has it, is that the remote, dispassionate and professorial president is just “not very good with the humans”. To that it might be added that he does not go down at all well with one sort of human in particular: the white working-class American.

Across the country, Democratic candidates know that victory in the imminent mid-term elections requires them not only to unhitch themselves from Mr Obama's waning star but also to attack whole chunks of the president's agenda. This may not be the obvious way for a political party to present itself for re-election, but at the level of individual races it makes sense. In 2008 many Democrats floated into Congress in Mr Obama's slipstream. Today he has become an albatross around their necks. His own job-approval rating has slumped below 50%. But it is lower than that among whites and lower still among working-class whites.

If the white working class has a capital, says Henry Olsen of the American Enterprise Institute, it is West Virginia, where more than nine out of ten people are white and six out of ten have never gone to college. For more than half a century, the Mountain State sent the late Robert Byrd, a Democrat, to represent it in the Senate. Now the state's popular governor, Joe Manchin, also a Democrat, is hoping to take his place. But this year everything is different. Despite Mr Manchin's relentless efforts to distance himself from that fellow in the White House, the race is a toss-up.

No other state is quite like this: in the electorate as a whole, the white working class adds up to perhaps 40% of the voters. But at a time when most working-class white voters are furious at the Democrats, the states where these voters are concentrated have become a happy hunting ground for Republicans. Mr Olsen thinks it no coincidence that a disproportionate number of the Democrats' most vulnerable House seats in the South, the north-east and the Midwest are in districts dominated by blue-collar whites. Democrats are struggling in the bellwether state of Ohio, and may lose the tight Senate races not only in West Virginia but also in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. The revolt of this class, he thinks, could be the defining characteristic of the election, counting more even than the rise of the (also mostly white, but mostly more affluent) tea-party movement.

White working-class voters are the quicksilver of American politics: they are hard to catch and hard to hold. The shifting loyalties of these “Reagan Democrats” (so called because the Gipper detached them from the Democrats in the 1980s, until the wiles of Bill Clinton wrested some of them back a decade later) have helped to swing American elections for decades. Their votes will matter less in the future, as their educational attainment rises and their share of the electorate continues to fall. Minority voters, who cast a mere 14% of votes in 1994, cast more than a quarter of them in 2008, and this share will grow. So plenty of Democratic forecasters from the demography-is-destiny school argue that in the long run the Republicans are doomed unless they can win over more blacks and Hispanics.

Between now and the long run, however, come the mid-terms. And the prospect of a Democratic rout prompts an inevitable question. Have such voters turned on the Democrats because Mr Obama is black? His election was hailed as proof that America had moved beyond race. And yet voting in the mid-terms will be polarised by race. Most whites will pull the Republican lever. Almost all blacks and most Hispanics will vote Democrat.

Race was a factor in 2008, and still is. Why else would blacks alone have stuck so staunchly by their man? As for working-class whites, they did not much care for Mr Obama even in 2008, preferring John McCain by a margin of 18%. But as Mr Obama campaigned, his colour seemed to count for less.

For 20 years Stan Greenberg, a Democratic pollster, studied the blue-collar white voters of Macomb County near Detroit. In 1984 they voted by two to one for Ronald Reagan because, Mr Greenberg found, when such voters heard Democrats talk about economic “fairness”, they saw this as code for transferring money to blacks. Nonetheless, in 2008 Mr Obama won Macomb County with a margin of eight points. Over the course of his campaign, the proportion of Macomb voters who said they were “comfortable” with the idea of Mr Obama as president rose from 40% to 60%. Having watched Mr Obama closely, Mr Greenberg concluded, they “became confident he would work for all Americans and be the steady leader the times required.”

Colour me fickle

If such voters have now changed their minds, the reason is not that Mr Obama is black—he was black in 2008. And for all its momentous symbolism, his election is not the most recent evidence that America has turned the page on race. In June, in South Carolina of all states, Tim Scott, a black Republican, defeated the son of the segregationist Strom Thurmond in a primary, and is on his way to a seat in the House. Compare that to 1983, when a disgraceful number of Democrats in Chicago voted for the Republican rather than send the black Harold Washington to city hall.

All of that has gone. The electorate may be divided by race, but no longer mainly because of race. Some of Mr Obama's enemies have tried to harness pockets of bigotry by painting him in various ways as un-American. But outright racism in politics is now beyond the pale and will probably have little to do with the coming rejection of the Democrats by the white working class. A wrecked economy and the feeling that their president is out of touch are reason enough. It has, after all, happened before. In two short years from 1992 to 1994, when Bill Clinton was president, white working-class support for the Republicans soared like a rocket from 47% to 61%. Nobody blamed that on skin colour.